


The Protection Racket

by pentapus



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 22:56:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/pseuds/pentapus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliot doesn’t look at her when she sits down. He’s got his fingers pressed against the bridge of his nose like he’s got a hangover. That’s when Alec notices they aren’t speaking to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Protection Racket

They spend a week in San Francisco on business. In the mornings, the rooms glow cream and gold with the sun off the bay. Parker spends her spare time cross-legged in the desk chair, draped across the open window sill with her chin on her arms. 

The night before they fly out, Sophie puts on her sensible shoes. Eliot goes with her as they walk through the city until she finds a wine bar that serves excellent bruschetta. They sit at a cluttered table for five in a room the color of pinot noir. She orders a bottle by price and puts all of it on a gleaming silver card. 

The wine bar is in the Castro, and ten minutes after they sit down, a naked man walks past the front windows wearing only sneakers and a woolen hat. Eliot closes one eye in a disbelieving wince. Even to Sophie, this is a bit more than she asked for, but local color is the reason people travel, isn’t it? Beautiful weather and pristine beaches notwithstanding - and not in San Francisco. 

“Don’t complain, darling, you’re a hit.” She offers a toast. 

Eliot gives her his skeptical face, but he’s undeniably relaxed, legs stretched out beneath the table. His fingers twitch towards the bruschetta.

Her phone buzzes just as two people walk through the door. Hardison towers behind Parker, thumbing a text on his blackberry, shopping bags from small boutiques held over his shoulder and a black golf cap askew on his head. Parker has a black beret of her own, her face tipped towards a tiny, paperback manual she reads as she walks. Sophie thinks: Oh, the picture they make.

“Greetings.” Hardison drops into a chair across from her.

“Hey,” Parker says suddenly, “Do we not have to wear clothes here? Is this a special no-clothes place?”

Hardison blinks, stares, stops. “Whoa,” he says, one hand up; the picture of a conflicted man. “Huu - _whoa_.”

“Whoa is right,” Eliot says.

“Probably not a good idea tonight, sweetie.” Sophie sips her wine and shrugs with a tilt of her head. She adds, ignoring the frantic axe motion Hardison makes, “but this would be the place for it.” 

Hardison sees the card waiting on the edge of the table, and just like that, he’s got the play. He tugs his cap down, one hand in the pocket of his dark, buckled jacket. His smirk is twice as striking as he thinks it is. “Now, ah, that wouldn’t be the mark’s card, would it?”

Sophie smiles. She lifts the bottle. “No job would be complete without a finishing touch. Wine?”

 

**

“Wine tastes better when Sophie buys it,” Parker says. 

“That’s because Sophie buys the one that says $400 next to it,” Eliot says, giving Hardison’s shoulder a tip that puts him face down on the bed.

“I will—I will be here if you need me,” Hardison mumbles. 

“Isn’t that what I said?” Parker frowns, bouncing on the bed next to Hardison’s head.

Eliot hesitates pulling off his jacket. Parker is staring at the ceiling, waiting. Her hands, thin and graceful, are almost swallowed by the full duvet. Eliot says, “Yeah, I guess it was.”

He lays his jacket across his duffel bag, always neatly packed and a moment from being carried out the door. Parker’s chin dips down, her hair the color of gold chains. She says, much too observant: “You brought all of your stuff.”

“It’s not that much stuff.”

“But it’s here,” Parker says. 

Eliot jabs a finger. “Do not give me a buddy up team speech just because I’m not keeping my own safe house anymore. You only got one back up harness here. Admit it, you’re still paranoid enough to set up your own bolt hole.”

“Yeah,” Parker says easily, “but I used to keep two.”

 

**

Parker walks off the jet bridge in hiking boots and an over-sized jailbird-stripe sweater. There’s a thoughtful look on her face underneath the overhead lights. They gleam off her black wig. 

Eliot doesn’t look at her when she sits down. He’s got his fingers pressed against the bridge of his nose like he’s got a hangover. That’s when Alec notices they aren’t speaking to each other. 

“Nice wig,” Alec says.

Parker starts paging through a Sky Mall magazine, legs crossed at the knee. “It’s not good to buy clothes you don’t wear,” she says in her special Sophie-ism lilt. 

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to–” Alec frowns. “Do you _like_ grifting?” He himself values a good performance. He’s a natural, it turns out, maybe a little too natural; sometimes he takes to grifting less like a duck to water and more like an albatross. 

Parker purses her lips, but her gaze shifts left to Eliot, the wire-straight black bob swaying around her face. Her fingers tighten in the magazine pages.

“You know that thing is complementary,” Eliot grumbles without looking up. Parker makes a disgusted sound and drops the magazine. She starts staring at Alec like it’s going out of style. 

“Right,” Alec says, and starts counting down the minutes to their connection.

 

**

Melanie Green begins her four year degree in downtown Boston at the Kingston School of the Arts. Melanie’s mother was upset; it sits on the edge of a dodgy neighborhood. The apartments across from her studio rent by the week. Wind tumbles litter down the sidewalks, but the setting is beautiful, aging brick buildings that match the photos on Melanie’s facebook page. 

They would make good backdrops for a 1920s heist film, she thinks. Sergio, in the space next to hers, plans to make one for a first year project. Indra, opposite, is more interested in the world food supply and intersections with consumerism. Melanie is not very good at talking to them, especially when they ask about Melanie’s large-scale architectural diagrams. 

“What’s the printing process?” Sergio says.

Melanie looks around. She holds up a technical pencil. “I drew them.” 

“The human ruler,” Indra says, blinking. Sergio purses his lips, but the surprise is positive. That’s important. Melanie isn’t anything like Alice White; she’s not good at small talk. 

Across the street, a lanky man walks into the weekly apartments carrying a wide poster tube, hat pulled low and wearing sunglasses in the shaded street. A few minutes later a light comes on behind the blinds in the window directly across from Melanie’s studio. Shortly afterwards, Melanie makes a small, precise mark on the edge of a sketch pad. It’s just one of thousands of absent doodles happening all the time in the studio. There’s nothing to it.

 

**

“Eliot isn’t speaking to me,” Parker tells the phone.

“I’m gonna stop speaking to you,” Alec says, a little hysterical. “Where the hell are you?”

 

**

“I’m in your line of work. You are _not_ in my line of work.” Eliot’s finger presses hard against the table top. Parker has her pencils out; she isn’t listening. His heart rate’s jumping for the roof, and he’s saying – he’s saying some _damn_ important things. “You are not qualified, Parker. You have not read the fine print.”

Parker keeps drawing, rigid, accurate lines arcing out from her long, breakable fingers. Her lips press together, satisfied.

 

**

“I am not mad at Parker. She was—she was casing my apartment.”

“Maybe she likes you,” Alec says. “But seriously – where the hell are you?”

“I got some people in town to talk to,” Eliot says. “You don’t let her leave base.”

“Base?” Alec says incredulously, but the line’s dead.

 

**

On Wednesday morning, Alec walks in to Parker eating her cheerios on the spiral stairs with her wrist in an ace bandage. Eliot is stomping down the stairs with a hand towel and an ice pack. He looks irritated as hell, and Parker has to squish up against the railing to let him by. 

“Eliot—” Nate, from upstairs. The floor creaks as he moves around out of sight.

“I got it,” Eliot says. “Would you stop eating with that.”

“It’s a spoon,” Parker says, looking across the room at the blank presentation screens.

She’s sitting curled in against the tiny staircase up at head height. Alec recognizes this, in a bad way, as part of Parker’s reverse claustrophobia; it’s one of the tighter spots she could get into in the open-plan room and still eat cheerios. The tighter ones are all weirder and less accessible, so she must be feeling sociable, even blowing Eliot off like a pro. At this point, Alec’s still thinking Parker must have done something in the kitchen. That makes it funny.

“Okay,” Alec starts. “So.”

“It’s a spoon in either hand,” Eliot snaps.

Slowly, she turns to look at him. She swaps hands jerkily, but she sticks her right hand under the bowl, and lifts it to her chin, shoveling in another spoonful. 

“Oh, do not even—” Eliot starts. Alec dives in, hands up and beret disarmingly askew, “Whoa, calm down, children, and tell me what the frak is going on.”

They don’t look at him. “I tripped,” Parker says. 

“Like hell she tripped.” Eliot’s got his coiled, ready, and pissed off stance going on, and Alec’s whosits and whatsits and wherefores are starting to run around inside his head.

“I _tripped_ ,” Parker says.

“And I tivo Oprah. Let’s watch it and talk,” Eliot says in a false, sweet lilt.

Alec frowns. “I’m still – uh – no, yeah, I got nothing here. Is there an explanation forthcoming?”

“I’m waiting on one,” Eliot says. 

Parker looks up, sees Alec, and her eyes go wide, then narrow. “ _Hardison._ ” - like she hasn’t just been speaking to him. She tips the bowl right up to her mouth, draining it, and takes a feline jump straight from her step to the hardwood floor. She’s at his side in another moment. “I need to talk to you.”

 

**

Parker is so into his space, he can smell her vanilla shampoo. His toes bracket hers; her busted wrist is propped on his chest. There are six feet deep of suits, shoes, slacks, dresses, minis, police officers and French maids in here. It’s not a small space and the lights can mimic noon-day sun with the turn of a knob. Alec doesn’t need the full length mirror at the back to tell him she’s cozier than she needs to be. Jesus, he thinks, is she grifting?

“Ok, Hardison –” she whispers, businesslike.

“Cupcakes,” he manages nonsensically. He hopes she’s not grifting -- it’s a confused performance, full of discordant notes. He lifts his head a little with the sudden need to swallow.

“India,” she corrects. Alec wrinkles his nose. She huffs impatiently. “They were hiding the last Golkunda diamond in a coconut on an organic vanilla farm. Vanilla prices were low; they had to diversify. Can we talk about the guy trying to kill Eliot now?”

“The guy trying to — hell.” Alec’s veins are trying to move ice, not blood. His hand falls to Parker’s bandaged wrist. 

“Shut up.” Parker rolls her eyes, but her mouth is turned down, her forehead all scrunchy. The message is clear: he's rehashing old news. “It’s not a big deal, I took care of it!”

“Where is he?”

“Standing outside the door, listening.” Parker gives him a look like he’s slow and kicks the bottom of the door. Heavy feet shift on the other side. Eliot says clearly, sounding a little stuffed up: “God damn it.”

“No — the guy.” 

She flaps her good hand. “In jail. He got arrested for assaulting an art student. I said I took care of it!”

Alec stares at her. “So what do you want me to do?”

She gives him a disbelieving look. “ _Take care of it._ ”

Eliot pounds on the door, two sharp bangs that make Alec jump. The guy’s got to be indestructible. He says, very clearly for the wood between them: “Y’all have a minute to come on out of there before I start asking in a more forceful tone of voice.”

Alec puts his hands on Parker’s shoulders, slight and bony under her sweatshirt. “Alright,” he says, “I’ll take care of it.” 

Then, because he’s already in fear for his life, he picks up her hand and kisses the bandaged back of her wrist. It smells, unfortunately, like Eliot’s socks. “To make it better,” he says into the ace bandage.

Parker gives him a round-eyed stare. She lifts up on her toes to press her own kiss to the inside of her wrist, so close she gives him an Eskimo kiss. 

“All better,” she whispers. 

Eliot wrenches open the door, daylight flooding the costume closet. Parker darts away like a minnow, and Alec’s left standing there with nothing but an empty hand and a whole host of fraudulent criminal evidence to enter into the record. 

Well, he did promise he’d take care of it.

**Author's Note:**

> This story -- wherein Parker puts the mark on a hitman who's come to Boston to take out Eliot -- was really intended to be longer, action-packed, and with way more peril. But with the exception of the last scene, this is what I managed to write before canon Eliot became That Permanently Pissed Off Guy who called Parker a weirdo all the time. I have enough personal experience with that; I don't need to watch it in fiction. 
> 
> I've since gone back to watch the whole show, and I'm so glad I did. The later seasons make the mutual affection and respect very clear and were good for my soul.
> 
> I chose the title because it implied both what Parker is doing in this story and what Eliot thinks about it (i.e. 'protecting him' and 'bullshit' respectively). 
> 
> Dear Parker: Never change.


End file.
